PROVIDING A PLACE TO BELONG: Why Communication For Children In Care Is Key

Fostering Families caught up with Mike McKenzie and Carol Hamilton, who have been fostering since 2007.
We wanted to find out about their experiences as carers and the inspiration behind the film Be-Longing.

Hello Mike and Carol, and thank you for joining us! It would be great to hear about your experiences as foster carers and why you both decided to get into fostering.

Mike: I’ve been influenced by what I saw my family do over many, many years both in this country and over in Jamaica. My Mum and Dad regularly looked after other members of our extended family, but it was Carol who brought up the idea of us becoming foster carers.

Carol: I grew up in a small town in Hampshire, and I first became aware of fostering and adoption through friends of my parents who adopted cross culturally. As a child, I was quite curious as to what was going on because it was obvious that they weren’t birth family members. This got me thinking about adoption and fostering generally, and at the time private fostering was quite prevalent. This is a different arrangement where families, often from abroad, will leave their children with British families who raise and educate them, and they may go back to their parents in their home country at a later point. When I became older and we had our own children we revisited the idea of fostering, and we offer short-term placements to children between the age of 5 and 13.

Your film Be-Longing was incredibly powerful. Could you share your inspiration behind it?

Mike: it came from the struggles I saw. Working in schools and working as a foster carer, you see the difficulties that parents and young people face. Whilst there’s a lot of great things happening, you find people who are struggling to get the help they need. You also see kids trying to articulate, or trying to understand the situation they are in, and make sense of what adults are saying – or not saying – so in the film we want to highlight that it’s important for people to think about the decisions they make.

Carol: It can be a struggle sometimes to get the children who come to us the help they need. We are often pushing for formal therapeutic support, even if the child is with us for a short period of time where we feel it’s beneficial for them. Sometimes it’s needed here and now, rather than waiting until they are in a more stable placement. Other times it’s more appropriate to wait for a stable, long term placement.

Mike: Be-Longing is doing a multitude of things, which is what we hoped for. I want the film to remind people that there is a child at the centre of the decisions you make, as well as letting people know what fostering is about. We’ve been getting people coming to us and asking whether they can do this: a friend phoned me up to ask about fostering, whether they could foster if they smoked, and how big their spare bedroom needs to be? I’m able to point them in the direction of their local authority and explain that they do a health check to make sure they’re healthy enough to be a foster carer and how the whole system of fostering works. My friend is now working towards giving up smoking to become a foster carer.

What is the most rewarding thing about being a foster carer?

Mike: watching the child arrive (sometimes there are two!), watching them grow and start to trust us and communicate how they feel. When I see a child who is able to do that, you’re hopeful that when the time comes for them to leave they will continue to communicate. We try to make our home a nice, safe place for them to be, but we hope for them to go back to their family (if appropriate) and feel more confident about themselves.

Carol: It’s really about the trust and giving them the confidence that not all adults are going to let them down. A lot of the kids that come us are very mistrustful of adults because they’ve been let down massively by adults, often time and time again. It’s great to see them place their trust in us and develop an emotional connection with an adult. If they can do that with us then we know that they can go out into the wide world and do that with other adults. We don’t necessarily see a lot of the skills that we work on with the children within our placement; we do see them getting better and hope they will be able to transfer those skills to the next interaction they might have with an adult.

An important thing to remember is the age of the children we’re dealing with. When you’re approaching adolescence it’s a tricky time in any child’s life, whether being fostered or not. Sometimes you have to separate out the behaviours that are normal adolescent behaviours, and the behaviour that might be a result of the trauma they’ve experienced because they’ve had to be removed from their home. We have lots of children’s whose behaviours are quite extreme, but they are communicating with you. It might not be the way another child might communicate, but that other child might not have had the levels of trauma that the child we’re fostering has. It’s understanding that they are communicating all the time, and trying to make them communicate in a way that will be beneficial to them when they leave us.

Communication is a really big theme in Be-Longing, and it’s something that you both talk so passionately about. Do you have any advice or tips for other carers on communicating well? 

Carol: it’s a tricky one because all children are different and all carers are different, so they are going to have their own strategies. There is a benchmark, of course, which is we should all be working to, but a lot of it is down to your own personality. As long as the child is developing emotionally and stabilising emotionally, and you’re teaching them resilience as well as the best ways to communicate then that’s the main thing.

Mike: we look for ways to build confidence and self-esteem, finding ways for them to see that they are good at something. For example, we have a chess-board in the living room and we see the kids getting better at it over time. I’ll teach some kids to play drums or the guitar to give them another experience, and some are involved in sports so we try to support them to do that. We’ve done this for our own children as well, so it’s not something that is special to working with kids who are care experienced – it’s about looking for opportunities to build their confidence in something they like to do. These can also be really good ways to get them talking. It’s not always plain sailing though – some things might not go well. For example some of our children have had issues with losing or frustrations when other kids are able to do things better than them and we have to look at the situation and ask how we’re going to deal with it.

If you ask a child ‘How was your day?’ the stock answer tends to be ‘Fine.’ Sometimes we need to change how we ask a standard question. It may be better to ask “What did you do today? It’s important to read around this and look at things like what mood they are in when they go to school. And what mood are they coming home in? You might see something and be able to dig a little deeper to find out what is causing different behaviours and moods.

Carol: A lot of kids don’t want to talk. One thing that we find useful is giving them different means of communicating other than talking. Some children prefer to draw you a picture, some might want to spend hours stroking the dog and the cat until they feel that they’re ready to communicate, and some kids will go and trash their room so you know they’ve had a pretty bad day at school. It’s all communication, and it’s not always positive. We’ve found that schools can be really good allies: more often than not we find that children have got a good relationship with at least one member of staff at school and we seek them out, whether it’s their teacher, or mentor, or a dinner lady. It’s handy so that we can work together. If we’re not getting that detail from the child, especially if they come back sad, angry or withdrawn, we can find out if something has happened.

And what would you say is the most challenging thing about being a foster carer?

Mike: again, a lot of it is communication. In the film we really wanted to highlight this, with the young boy not having a voice 

He wants to be communicated with, he’s trying to communicate but people aren’t listening and they don’t hear his voice.

Carol: Not every placement goes to plan. Sadly, in some placements the children leave or there’s a problem somewhere and we haven’t been able to fulfil the obligation we’ve taken on. Even though we’re quite experienced now, there are some things that are beyond our control. Certainly, when our children were younger we always had to put them first, and if there were placements that were causing our children emotional harm then we had to say that it wasn’t working. These are horrible, horrible decisions. Mostly, our children have been really helpful and really positive when it comes to having foster children in the house.

One of the frustrations I have is that the foster carers are not always included as part of the professional network. Sometimes we’re not invited along to meetings which have a direct effect on the children that we’re looking after in our home and decisions are made – and sometimes communicated – and we’re not sought out as to what our view is. That can be frustrating because, whilst we understand that there is a professional network to make sure the child can be the best they can be, sometimes it can be helpful to have our view. The child is living with us and feeding information to us, that they want us to feed to social workers, therapists and educators.

Sometimes the child doesn’t feel that they are being heard, and they rely on us to pass on what they are saying and wanting.

We do make it clear to them that sometimes what they want is not what is good for them, but we will still pass on that information because it’s important that they are heard. They should feel that they are able to say it. That’s a real frustration not just for the child, but for us as well. As we’ve got more experienced, we’ve had constructive meetings with professionals and we have been lucky to have been well supported by our supervising social workers, but it doesn’t always go as it should.

He wants to be communicated with, he’s trying to communicate but people aren’t listening and they don’t hear his voice. Carol: Not every placement goes to plan. Sadly, in some placements the children leave or there’s a problem somewhere and we haven’t been able to fulfil the obligation we’ve taken on. Even though we’re quite experienced now, there are some things that are beyond our control. Certainly, when our children were younger we always had to put them first, and if there were placements that were causing our children emotional harm then we had to say that it wasn’t working. These are horrible, horrible decisions. Mostly, our children have been really helpful and really positive when it comes to having foster children in the house. One of the frustrations I have is that the foster carers are not always included as part of the professional network. Sometimes we’re not invited along to meetings which have a direct effect on the children that we’re looking after in our home and decisions are made – and sometimes communicated – and we’re not sought out as to what our view is. That can be frustrating because, whilst we understand that there is a professional network to make sure the child can be the best they can be, sometimes it can be helpful to have our view. The child is living with us and feeding information to us, that they want us to feed to social workers, therapists and educators. Sometimes the child doesn’t feel that they are being heard, and they rely on us to pass on what they are saying and wanting. We do make it clear to them that sometimes what they want is not what is good for them, but we will still pass on that information because it’s important that they are heard. They should feel that they are able to say it. That’s a real frustration not just for the child, but for us as well. As we’ve got more experienced, we’ve had constructive meetings with professionals and we have been lucky to have been well supported by our supervising social workers, but it doesn’t always go as it should.

How did you feel being asked to screen Be-Longing at the Montreal Black Film Festival?

Mike: It was an amazing feeling for the film to recognised by a great film festival and I was very happy for myself and the great team that helped to make the project successful. I would like to thank the team including Casey McKenzie, Danielle DMo Oke: script, Lee Daley Director of Photography, Steven McKenzie Production Manger, Marilyn Napaul Producer, Kevin Leo music/ supporter, Eva Brandt, Denis Collen, Carol Hamilton, Isaac Hamilton McKenzie & Sheldon Hamilton McKenzie. I would also like to thank Harvey Gallagher of Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers for their support of us as foster carers and the film Be-Longing. Look out for the next instalments of Be-Longing films.

Mike and Carol are using their film Be-Longing as a training aid for foster carers, social workers, and others in the care sector during screenings. To find out more please visit their website: be-longing.com